Defender of Rome Read Free

windows that held, at best, the threat of the contents of a night soil pot, if not the pot itself. Twin wagon ruts doubled as an open sewer, the contents reeking in trapped heat that barely cooled from one day to the next. Every step was an invitation to fall into a trap and every darkened entrance a potential ambush.
    Still, he’d had no choice but to wait for Julia’s return and if he’d tried to recruit some battered ex-gladiator or retired legionary from a tavern, the likelihood was that he’d only be paying for the dagger that tickled his liver or slit his throat. Left or right? He ran the physician’s directions through his head as he considered the junction of two identical passageways. It had seemed much simpler in the comfort of the villa’s atrium. ‘Just follow the old Via Subura until you reach the Via Tiburtina and carry on until you’re a hundred paces from the Esquiline Gate. He has rooms in the insula on the right. Ground floor.’ In daylight Valerius would have had to fight his way through a surging mass of people, at risk from nothing more than carelessly wielded chair poles or bony elbows, jostled and hustled, melting in the heat, but never directly threatened. Now he was trapped in a pitch dark, verminous labyrinth where every street appeared the same and the only consolation was that the hour was so late the few inhabitants he’d come across had been rolling drunk.
    He turned sharply at a rustling sound, the hand beneath his cloak reaching instinctively for his sword. The rustling stopped, to be replaced by a low whine, and he laughed at himself. Gaius Valerius Verrens, Hero of Rome, the man who had held the Temple of Claudius to the last man, scared of a scavenging hound.
    Left or right?
    Right.
    He had pleaded to stay in the legions, even though he knew his injury meant he would never again fight in a battle line. No, his father had said, this is our great opportunity: the law, then the Senate; make the name Valerius ring through the marble halls of the Palatine. He’d obeyed, out of duty: the same sense of duty that had made him the soldier he had once been. And he had prospered thanks to the patronage that the Corona Aurea attracted. Every retired veteran, be he general or legionary of the third rank, wanted to be represented by Gaius Valerius Verrens. As with his battles, he won more cases than he lost, because he took a professional care in his preparations and fought hard for his clients, even when he didn’t believe a word they told him.
    The street widened and he saw a pale light ahead. Some sort of open space.
    ‘He is a medical man just arrived from the east,’ Metellus had said. ‘Some say he is a worker of wonders and some say he deals in perfumed smoke and polished mirrors. A Judaean, he works among his people, seeking no profit. He does not advertise his services. You will have to be very persuasive. What does he look like? How should I know?’
    The light came from a noisome drinking den behind an open yard with a stone fountain carved in the shape of a fish. Valerius hurried by, trying to look like just another drunk. But the eyes that watched him were the eyes of predators, not those of ordinary men.
    A man might survive in Subura without being part of a gang, paying a gang or owning a gang, but his hold on life, and his family’s, would be precarious. Red-haired Culleo, bastard son of only Jupiter knew whom, had been running with gangs for as long as he could remember. First as a lookout while others stole, then as a thief, learning to steal bread and fruit and meat from the streetside stalls while the younger boys distracted the owners. With growing strength came greater opportunity and he had become an enforcer. He had killed his first man by the time he was fifteen and cut the throat of his predecessor three years later. He favoured the knife, and he carried two: wickedly curved, long-bladed weapons that he fondly kept killing sharp and which were equally good for